Why your gut is making you POOR | Ep 10

My goal is to help listeners become smarter at gambling and smarter with risk in general , so you can apply these lessons , make a lot of money and then come back and teach me a thing or two . I don't run ads , so I'd appreciate it if you like , subscribe and share this with someone who might be interested .

Last thing , I want you to please join the GoldenPants13 Discord server link in the show notes . It's a free sports betting and DFS Discord server that blows any paid Discord server out of the water . You can safely unsubscribe from all your paid servers . Join ours and have access to higher quality picks , a more engaged community and a ton of cool events .

I hope to see you in there and let's get on with the show . Hey everybody , what's up ? Gp13 here Today we're going to be talking about our guts . Not our gut health , not being overweight because we sit all day , but trusting our gut . Should we trust our gut ? When should we trust our gut ? Are there any stipulations to trusting our gut , et cetera .

So on the last stream I was asking people what some topics were they wanted to hear on the podcast , and there's a few good ones , but one that got multiple requests was when you should go with your gut , what about trusting your gut , et cetera .

So this is something I've thought a lot about because I've been gambling professionally for 14 years and pretty much every big decision I've ever had to make in gambling I had some kind of instinct , gut reaction to .

And , I think , one thing that I've talked a lot about with other professional gamblers , traders , whoever is do you trust your gut or how do you factor in that initial feeling you get when facing a decision , that initial lean into your decision-making process ?

So I've come up with three rules about how to think , about how to think about those initial gut reactions , that initial feeling you get when you look at a bet , when you're evaluating something .

Rule number one if you are not clearly a proven winner in your game , in your gambling game , in sports betting , in poker and trading this is a clear , proven , significant winner over a long time frame . Never trust your gut , never . It's actually probably wrong most of the time and it's actually crazy .

So I can tell you a scenario at my trading firm when new traders would come in , we would often listen to what they wanted to do , what positions they took , and we would frequently take the other side , because when you come in , your gut is your gut . You don't know anything .

Your gut , your quote unquote gut , is just some theoretical manifestation of your experience , right ? So that's how we have to think about this .

And when you're not at a level yet where you've achieved sustained success , your experience isn't high enough and therefore your quote unquote gut is unlikely to be correct and it could even be deliberately like steering you wrong in the beginning .

For example , I think there's a tendency for in DFS or DFS Pickham , for a lot of people to only play overs and I've talked with Dame a lot about this and some other people , and I think the reason why we as humans tend to want to play overs is that there's a narrative there that's easier to explain in our mind .

We can see oh , all it takes is a Tani hitting a double with a man on base and he hits this line . Oh , it's just one goal . This is a weak team . Mcdavid scored the last three games . He's played them . I can see that him getting a goal . I can picture in my mind Conor McDavid cutting through the defense and then scoring .

But it takes a lot of mental power to picture the 30 minutes of ice time that Conor McDavid is going to get without scoring goal . It's not as easy to visualize and I think that's in our gut , is telling us something around those lines of like oh , I have a feeling McDavid will score here or whatnot .

But when we look at the numbers , maybe Pinnacle has McDavid as an underdog to score and I'm going to go with Pinnacle or I'm going to go with my model . Compared to that initial reaction I have to the game being like , oh , he's playing this bad team so he'll probably score . Or man , I don't trust their defense , or just some kind of narrative .

We try and tell ourselves that's what our guts pushing and if we don't have experience it's going to be pushing basically like useless narratives on us and we have to be careful . We have to protect ourselves from that and I've seen this happen when I've switched games . For instance , my poker gut was eventually very good . It didn't start off great .

It got to a point where it was really really good at the type of game I was playing . Then , when I switch over to sports betting , my gut was just tragic , terrible . And you know what ? I luckily had gone through poker and I knew that even though my gut and poker was solid , it never used to be that way . That took a long time .

So I didn't naturally give my gut much credence when I switch over to sports betting . But as I've become more experienced I've started to weigh those initial feelings or looks a little bit differently .

But that's only because I know that somewhere they're based on some kind of pattern that I can't naturally articulate but must be there , since I've seen thousands and thousands of bets and line moves and etc . So the first rule about your gut is that if you don't have the experience , you don't have the gut . Okay .

Rule number two of trusting your gut , no matter what , your gut is always just another input . I would recommend this If you've decided , okay , I'm a long-term winner , I've shown over a sustained number of bets that I'm a successful , better and I'm starting to want to dabble in quote-unquote trusting my gut , but I don't know where to start .

Like what does that mean ? Does that mean I just , every time I have a feeling , I kind of throw the model out the window and place the bet based on my feeling . If you've come this far and you're winning this much , you of course know the answer to that question is no .

But it's not as easy to understand how we incorporate our gut or our feelings into our decision-making process once you've kind of earned the right to do so .

I would suggest this you have your model , you have your process and whatever , as you're going through and you're making your bets , and you're making the bets that your model is saying or that your process is saying , I would right next to it in a column in Excel , and we did this for a while where we would be like a little bit lean , you know a little bit

stronger lean here . My feeling is I have a lean here , I have a non quote-unquote , non-model lean that this is a stronger , weaker bet and we just record it before the bet happens . As we put the bet in , and once you start to track these results , it's going to do two things .

One , it's actually going to give you a database of results that at some point you're going to , might start to get a large enough sample where you can analyze it and truly back test your gut not back test your gut , but see if your gut is actually onto something there .

And two , when you put it down you're really taking a stand , because a lot of other times it's so easy to have a gut feeling about something . We can have gut feelings both ways .

Here's one thing that I do a lot with my wife is we read these murder mystery books and by the end of it we would have guessed every single character in the book was the murderer . And then by the time you get to the end , you know who it is . You're like oh I totally guessed that , but you guessed everybody in the book , right ?

So there's not much credence to like that proving your predictive power . But once you actually put it down on paper before the you know before the murder is revealed , and you get to only pick one person or you get to put down your Excel sheet this is your gut read . All of a sudden it starts to make you pay a little more attention .

You'll get more of that process just because you're tracking it . You're going to put more effort in and you'll get to track the results . All right . In rule number three about trusting your gut , this has to do more with your quote , unquote , off the table stuff , as we would say in poker .

Gut reads are going to be far more affected by bad sleep , bad diet , emotional state , just being tired or being over it , whatever All these things that can go on with our health and our personal life . They're going to affect your gut reads more than they're going to affect your overall process .

Because , let's say , your process is I'm going to go on to Pinnacle and I'm going to use it to find value bets on Fandal . Very basic process , right ? You go , you take the Pinnacle line , you remove the juice and you just see if there's any bets on Fandal that provide positive EV from that D-Juice Pinnacle line .

If you haven't slept a wink or you're just going through a shit breakup or you've been pigging out on the couch not exercising enough , the Pinnacle D-Juice line especially if you're doing some kind of form of automating , it is going to be the same . It doesn't matter , it's always going to be the same . The Fandal line is going to be the same .

You can automate that to a point where , no matter how you feel , your results should be about the same .

If you're factoring in some kind of what I would call more artistic qualities to this bet , being like , hmm , yeah , I actually have been following this player and XYZ or whatever , I would be very , very , very careful of putting any significant money behind it if you're feeling shit , because that's going to actually impact what we would say like these natural feelings

are , this would be not being in the zone . So you hear athletes talk about like being in the zone In poker , when I felt like I was in the zone . Or in sports betting , when I feel like I'm in the zone , I'm making , you know , it's like a flow .

I might not know exactly what the play is , but I'm trusting myself in that moment because I'm so in tune that , like this plays good and I've , you know , put up a large sample of work to feel comfortable , trusting myself when you get in that zone , when you're , you know , well rested , you're eating healthy , you've exercised and whatever , that's when your gut is

going to be more effective . So you have to pay attention to your mental state , to your health , if you're going to go down this path of factoring your feeling into your reads and betting and there's so many great , great gamblers actually , like almost every great gambler has some aspect of this that they do .

It's never just the spreadsheet Like I say this a lot but like the best bets that we've made were not the ones that , like , we saw a 3% edge on our spreadsheet just from being able to model something better .

It's always been some like weird thing we figured out by like reading the terms and conditions or figuring out some you know correlation , or just paying attention to the market and having like someone fuck up a mistake and figuring it out .

Like it's just been these weird things that happen you happen to realize when you're really in the flow of the market , right ? So , again , a lot of the great bettors , they do have this like partial art to their process . Just remember that that art is going to be more affected by negative conditions in your personal life and wager accordingly .

All right , that was fun . Talking about our gut reactions , do we incorporate them into our process ? If so , how do we do that ? Remember , probably shouldn't be doing that , but if we do , we got to remember the rules track it .

Make sure that it's just a part of the process , not the whole process , and keep tabs on how you're feeling emotionally , mentally , physically , when you're dealing with making these gut choices . If you're not in a good place , I would kind of try and shift away from making those gut reads and stick more towards your bread and butter process .

So that's it for this week . Well , actually I might drop another episode . I don't know , Don't hold me to that , but please find me in the discord . We're bumping now over a thousand members . Hop in , share , you know . Share this episode with a friend . We're trying to grow this community . So please . You know I do a lot of this stuff for free .

Actually , I do all of this stuff for free . One ask would be if you could just give this , give this podcast a share , or hop into the discord , follow me on Twitter or something . I got all the links in the show notes . Thanks for listening and I'll see you guys next episode .